The Quiet American

'The Quiet American'

Barry Hillenbrand June 19, 2004 - 6:00pm

In March 1974, after nearly two years of covering the war in Vietnam, I boarded an Air Vietnam flight to Bangkok on route to a new assignment in Rio de Janeiro. Goodbye Tu Do Street, Hello Ipanema. I pulled a paperback out of my shoulder bag and began turning the slightly tattered pages of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, a book I had first read fifteen years earlier. How would Greene’s 1955 novel of love, war, and treachery in the...

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